Authors: Michael Wood
Chapter 8
The red squirrels were doing their early morning party piece, scrambling up the oars Ben had left leaning against the cottage wall. Near them stood his fishing rod, and two golf clubs. They were all supposed to reside in the garage, but they never seemed to get there until he brought the boat up from the lake for winter maintenance.
Ben filled up the bird nut holder and scattered grain for the pheasants that gathered around his ankles. As usual, the mallard ducks started to nudge the pheasants out and take over their food, until Ben scattered their breakfast on a different part of the lawn.
While they all tucked in, Ben took hold of a golf club and took a practice swing. A chunk of lawn flew up. As he retrieved the divot, a knock on the conservatory window attracted his attention. Helen sat at the window, drinking her morning coffee, waving her fist in mock annoyance at the damage to the lawn, then mimed that his coffee was ready.
Ben replaced the divot in the dew soaked grass, placed the golf club against the old stone wall, absorbed the recondite sunlight, the sweet dank smell of the yew hedge and the surrounding trees, the flitting, quacking, chattering life around him, and went in contented.
Time together was precious. Managing the leisure centre took a lot of Helen’s time. It was open from six in the morning till ten in the evening, seven days a week, offering a multitude of facilities and training courses. Helen was always on call. When she wasn’t at the centre she was usually taking calls at home.
It was because of this heavy workload that Ben had refrained from burdening her with his concerns about the deaths of Jack Fraser and his wife. But now his investigations had ground to a halt, he was keen to get her point of view. She always brought a pragmatic, down-to-earth approach to situations, compared to his more quixotic, facetious, approach. They made a good team.
Sitting beside her, sipping his coffee, Ben glanced at her to see if she might be receptive. Too late - her head was buried, as usual, in a wad of papers.
He shuffled to the other end of the sofa, lounged back, and watched her, deep in concentration. He liked her hair most of all. It displayed every shade of light brown, from milk chocolate to light gold. It was always clean and shining, and flowed in a curve to her shoulder like fresh molten lava. There was no make-up, no trinkets, just an everyday 40-something face that spoke of strength, serenity, generosity. She was beautiful, and he loved her, and more than this, he respected her.
Eventually, she put the papers down on the coffee table, and glanced at him. ‘Fancy a walk? I’ve a couple of letters to post.’
The walk took them north along the lake’s tree lined east shore, around Scarness Bay, skirting the grounds of Scarness Manor, followed the stream across the fields, and over the hump back bridge into the village; still farming, not yet given over to tourism; the smell of manure always in the air.
The post box stood in front of a group of farm buildings whose erratic confluence of rooftops and chimneys framed against the smooth shaped backdrop of Skiddaw always caught Ben’s eye. He kept promising himself to capture it on canvas one day. Today, it reminded him of tragedy.
As they turned to go home, this time via the lanes, not the lakeside, Ben was still looking up at Skiddaw. ‘Remember those deaths up there a few weeks ago?’ he asked.
‘The government minister?’
‘And his wife.’
‘Yes.’
‘I was talking to someone who believes the minister was murdered by his colleagues...’
‘Go on, get it over with,’ Helen sighed. ‘You know I can see your awful jokes coming.
And
you know I don’t like cruel ones....’
‘No ...it’s not a joke. Somebody really thinks he was murdered...’
‘By his colleagues?’
‘Yes...well, by agents acting on behalf of his colleagues.’
‘Acting on behalf? You make them sound like solicitors. Are you really serious?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Who told you this nonsense? Somebody with a glass in their hand, no doubt.’
Ben latched on to the suggestion. ‘Well, he had, but he wasn’t drunk. It was a journalist with the Workington Herald. Their paper’s part of a big group. He said the rumour was going around their London head office.’
‘Well,’ Helen scoffed. ‘You know what they’re like in London. Nothing better to do than make up rumours. Keeps the chattering classes entertained.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Oh! Come on, you can’t.........what’s the motive supposed to be...pinched their parking space, or slept with their secretaries?’
Ben winced. ‘Bit more serious than that! Something to do with his involvement with the nuclear industry...look out.’ He grabbed Helen’s arm and guided her on to the grass verge as a tractor and trailer loaded with manure rumbled past.
Helen stepped back on to the tarmac. ‘It all sounds to me like a load of what’s just gone past on that trailer,’ she said, pointedly. ‘These conspiracy theories always come to nothing. Remember Kennedy, remember Monroe? Nothing is ever proved. If the police don’t find anything, then there’s nothing to find.’
‘The police still don’t think it was an accident,’ Ben countered. ‘But they have no evidence of foul play. The Coroner reconvened the inquest last week and they came up with an open verdict. So it looks like it’s going to be just another unsolved mystery. I’m pretty sure they were murdered.’
‘You might be sure, but you’re not pretty,’ Helen gibed, as she playfully slapped his bottom and started running down the lane.
This was her way of ending a conversation she didn’t like. She had never been keen on politics, deep and meaningful discussions, or the darker side of humanity. Sometimes Ben found it frustrating when a serious conversation fizzled out, but he respected the insinuation implicit in her philosophy - that it is better to focus on the good things in life.
He gave chase. ‘Hey! You...come here...that hurt...’
After a hundred metres, she let him catch her and they hugged, breathlessly, while he took gentle revenge on her bottom. Their breathing was so loud that they didn’t hear the sniffs. Nor did they see the eyes that watched them from the nearby trees.
Chapter 9
The WRACS facility was nearing completion when Hector was summoned to the plant manager’s office. He feared redundancy.
Callum McDonald said, ‘Good news.’
Hector relaxed.
‘Sellafield have started to build a new vitrification plant, the one that turns high-level waste into glass blocks. Well, they’re having trouble designing a micro-concrete for the process position inserts. They’ve been working on it for three months at the Sellafield lab. All their theoretical designs have failed in practice and they’re getting desperate for time. The micro-concrete has to be non shrink, flow-able enough to pump into narrow voids, achieve 3,000 pounds per cubic metre density, and its specified compressive strength.’
‘They want us to help them with their testing programme. Which is where you come in. Work on WRACS is running down. You can start on this straight away.’
‘What do I have to do?’ Hector gulped, worried it would be over his head.
‘Don’t worry,’ Callum said. ‘They have produced all the designs.’ He handed Hector a thin file. ‘They are all in there. All you have to do is source the materials, follow their instructions, and carry out the tests.’
‘Is it a question of adjusting the admixtures, or is there still some granulometry to be sorted?’ Hector asked, feeling less nervous now.
His boss pointed to the file. ‘You’ll see in there. The granulometry is the same throughout. They obviously see it as an admixture issue. Their biggest problem, apparently, is settlement of the extra lead in the micro-mix. They have nominated a cocktail of five admixtures. It seems to be a question of finding precisely the right dosage of each. The permutations are endless, so you could be in for a long haul. It could get boring.’
‘I won’t get bored’, Hector said. Inside, he felt excited. He couldn’t wait to get started. It would be fascinating.
*
Within two weeks he had sourced all materials and commenced testing regimes. Such was his enthusiasm that they had to buy more steel cube moulds as he produced mix after mix and took up large areas of the laboratory with six inch cubes of cast micro-concrete in various stages of maturity.
But, eventually, his enthusiasm gave way to frustration as test after test failed to meet the criteria in one way or another.
*
At night, his life was lonelier than ever. Since moving into the croft he visited Thurso only once a week for shopping. This always included three bottles of whisky, and a kerb crawl around the streets to see if he could catch sight of Kathleen Rinaldi. On the occasions that he did, she didn’t appear to notice him.
By now, he was seeking solace in videos as well as music and alcohol. The late night viewing and excessive alcohol meant that he routinely started the day with a hangover.
*
It was a hangover that changed his life. It had been a heavy weekend: head throbbing, tongue coated, breath ignitable. It was Monday lunchtime before he realised that he had not added any admixtures to the six micro-mixes he had poured that morning.
‘Shit,’ as he pushed the six half-set cubes into a corner of the workbench. He would dispose of them tomorrow. Meanwhile, he hurriedly started on a new batch.
The next day he removed the six cubes from their moulds and threw them in the waste bin. Then, out of curiosity, he picked out one cube and placed it under the compressive strength-crushing machine. It met the strength criteria. He increased the pressure to break the cube in half. The lead shot was uniformly distributed. He weighed it. The density was 3,120. He was getting excited. He measured it. ‘Shit.’ Slight shrinkage had occurred. But he could probably adjust that. He had done the flow tests yesterday before pouring the mix into the moulds. He grabbed the book with the results. ‘Shit’ again. The flows were just short of the criteria. He sat down and thought hard. He had almost satisfied the design criteria without adding any of the five admixtures. It didn’t make sense. According to his limited knowledge, all he had to do now was add a small quantity of super-plasticiser to increase the flow, and a lignosulphonate to stop the shrinkage. He grabbed the other five cubes from the bin and put them through the tests. All five showed similar results.
During the rest of that week, he carried out a series of tests on his own designs alongside the routine Sellafield designs. By Friday he had arrived at the optimum percentage of super-plasticiser and lignosulphonate to add, and was satisfying all test criteria except one - lead settlement.
He couldn’t wait for Monday. He went to work over the weekend, and again followed basic principles. This time he adjusted the granulometry, reducing the fines and increasing the large aggregates to give more support to the lead shot. He poured five slightly varying cubes and left them for testing on Monday.
The only hangover he had on that Monday was due to lack of sleep, not alcohol. His mind had been racing throughout the night, unable to rid itself of the infinite formulations that had imprinted themselves.
He started his tests. One of the five cubes met all the criteria. Excited, but still unsure, he took his results and his explanations to his boss.
Callum McDonald was intrigued and supportive. He instructed Hector to make ten cubes of his formulation, and to carry out more tests with himself present. Two days later, he was shaking Hector’s hand. All ten cubes were within the design parameters. Hector had cracked it.
Being a good Christian, and unlike most managers, Callum McDonald took no credit when he passed on the good news to Sellafield Concrete Laboratory.
Not only were they delighted that the problem had been solved, but they pointed out that Hector’s formulation was also a lot cheaper than envisaged because of the reduction in the number of admixtures. They invited Hector down to Sellafield to thank him, to discuss his formulation, and to try to discover why their own designer’s formulations hadn’t worked.
Hector had hated the attention, the back slapping, the hand shaking, and he had felt out of his depth and embarrassed when he was invited to join in discussions with Sellafield’s design engineers as they theorised about their formulation’s failure. He contributed nothing as he listened to these confident men, all with degrees, go over their calculations, and find nothing wrong with them.
Much to his relief, the answer was found within three days by one of Hector’s equivalents in the Sellafield laboratory, a humble lab technician called John Grey.
Hector’s simple design, and hindsight, guided him to conclude that the five admixtures were not behaving as they should. He carried out tests and found that at the high dosages specified by the design engineers, who had based their designs on extrapolation of previously successful designs, the admixtures were causing unforeseen side effects within the micro-concrete, much like strong drugs do in humans.
For this design, the engineers should not have used extrapolation, but gone back to first principles. This was why someone with Hector’s basic knowledge, and a lucky hangover, had come up with the answer.
The fact remained that, however lucky, Hector had saved them a lot of time, and money. Now they could proceed to invite concrete supply companies to submit quotations for supplying Hector’s formulation in pre-bagged commercial quantities. They had decided to call it HD3000, everyone concerned understanding that the H stood for Hector as well as the High in High Density.
*
Two months later, with the WRACS facility complete, Hector was offered a permanent quality control position in the Dounreay Cementation Plant (DCP). This encapsulated old Reactor raffinate in a cementitious matrix within stainless steel drums.
Shortly after starting his new job, Hector heard on the grapevine that a small Essex Company called Amtex had won the contract to supply HD3000 to Sellafield.
*
Six months later, back in his old dissolute routine, glad to be anonymous again, he was surprised by a summons from his old boss at the laboratory. Callum McDonald came straight to the point.
‘How do you fancy a trip to the Philippines?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Remember the HD3000?’
‘Yes.’
‘My boss, Eric Diller at Sellafield, wants you to go to the Philippines with the Sales Manager of Amtex Ltd at the end of this month. They have the opportunity to sell a lot of HD3000 for a new American waste facility to be built there. Amtex have asked Sellafield to supply some technical back-up to help them with their bid. Apparently Sellafield owes them a few favours, and Amtex will be footing the bill, so Eric agreed to help them. He reckons it will only be a PR job, nothing too technical, just flag waving. This is his way of thanking you for saving them money. The trip will last about three weeks, mainly because the Amtex man has other business there. Your bit should only take a few days, educating a Philippine import company and a few government officials. How you spend the rest of your time is up to you. Do you think you are up to it?’
Hector hesitated. He now felt confident about his technical ability, but he was still hopeless socially, and he daren’t admit that he had never been abroad. The prospect terrified him.
‘It’s not really my kind of thing is it,’ he said, looking for confirmation from the man he respected.
‘Well, I don’t think so,’ Callum McDonald said frankly, ‘and I told Eric so, and I asked him if he could send somebody else. But he insisted it must be you. He thinks he is doing you a big favour. He likes feeling magnanimous. I couldn’t dissuade him.’
That night, Hector downed extra whisky and listened to Bach, but he still couldn’t sleep.